DP-300 Certification Practice Question #181

Question

You have an Azure SQL database.
You identify a long running query.
You need to identify which operation in the query is causing the performance issue.
What should you use to display the query execution plan in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)?

Accepted Answer

To analyze a slow or long-running query and pinpoint the specific operation causing performance degradation (such as a key lookup, index scan, or bad join), the standard DBA practice is to analyze the actual execution plan (Option C). The actual execution plan provides complete, detailed post-execution runtime statistics (actual vs. estimated rows, exact CPU/I/O operator costs, and warnings) for each physical operator. While Live Query Statistics (Option A) can show real-time progress, it does not provide the finalized resource and cost summaries required to identify the root cause of the performance issue. Estimated plans (Option B) are based on statistics and do not reflect actual runtime issues.

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